Lemmygrad

Lemmygrad Type Online forum link aggregator Available in English Founded 17 August 2019 Founder Muad'Dibber Key people Felipe Forte, CriticalResist8, CaptCalhoun, Black Tulip, moist-leninist, sometimes ashley Users 7,700 registered accounts 200 active users Espoused ideology Marxism-Leninism Dengism URL lemmygrad.ml

Lemmygrad.ml is a principally Marxist-Leninist and Dengist link aggregator (similar to Reddit) founded in August 2019. The site is powered by the free and open source software called Lemmy and is federated with other websites that rely on Lemmy to function (similar to Mastodon or Matrix, with which Lemmy is able to federate). As of February 2023, the site hosts nearly 40,000 posts and around 300 active users per month, although actual patterns of user activity varies.

Lemmygrad was founded at a time when Reddit was cracking down on communist communities as a way for communists to have their own space free of corporate rules and ownership.

Lemmygrad is owned by its creator and hosted from the personal finances of its moderators and donations. The website does not contain advertisements and does not collect user information beyond what is necessary for the site to function.

Functioning

Federation

Lemmy, the software which is used to run Lemmygrad, is compatible with ActivityPub which is a federation protocol used by many other projects (such as Mastodon, Peertube). Websites powered by Lemmy are usually called instances.

This means that it is possible to interact with other instances which run Lemmy or, since an update, even with a Mastodon or Peertube user, all from one's home instance, which is the instance they created their account on (e.g. Lemmygrad). This is similar to phone calls, where it is possible to call someone that doesn't have a contract with your phone company.

Each Lemmy instance comes with an empty blacklist by default, which allows them to block other instances from interacting between each other.

Communities

As a link aggregator, Lemmygrad functions similarly to Reddit with communities in which people can post text or pictures (or both at the same time). Other users can then comment in those posts, which become threads (similar to forums).

Users

Similar to Reddit, users can create accounts (and provide short answers to some questions to make sure they are not spammers, percived wreckers, or "ideological undesirables").

Once their account is approved, users can subscribe to a community so that posts from that community will appear in their Subscribed view.

There are three views:

• Subscribed, which shows communities one is subscribed to (including federated communities on other instances),
• Local, which shows all communities from the instance one is on, and
• All, which acts like Local but additionally shows all communities from all federated instances

Users are able to create communities on their home instance and become its moderator.

Administration and moderation

Lemmygrad possesses an administration team, which is able to act on the whole instance as moderators.

Moderators are different from administrators in that the former can only act on their own communities, and not on the whole instance.

This means also that while moderators can only ban people from their community, administrators can ban people from the whole instance.

History

Founding and early developments

Lemmygrad was founded in August 2019, with its first post being on the 17th of that month.

Genzedong migration

In March 2022, the GenZedong subreddit was quarantined on Reddit for promoting Ukrainophobic content and disinformation regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War. Its accompanying communities of "GenZhou" (its educational outlet) and "GenZhukov" (its military history and tactics outlet) were banned, according to Reddit, for being used to evade the quarantine on GenZedong despite being created prior to the quarantine.

Lemmygrad received a huge influx of users at that time and had to establish user account vetting as, at the same time, trolls from GenUSA (a pro-US imperialism, chauvinist community made in response to the growing popularity of GenZedong) were also making accounts to troll Lemmygrad.

As a response to this huge influx of new users, the administrators of Lemmygrad made several posts to try and get them acclimated to Lemmygrad quickly, as it was different to Reddit in many ways (in the rules, the federation aspect, and the methods of moderating). Eventually, two moderators from GenZedong were made into site admins so there could be communication between the community of GenZedong and the administrators of Lemmygrad.

This increase in site activity was temporary and eventually subsided later in the year 2022. However, the c/GenZedong community on Lemmygrad remains the forum's most active community.

Denial-of-service attacks

Along with the migration of the GenZedong community, Lemmygrad suffered denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against it, taking down the site for a number of hours at some points between March and May. This prompted the administrators of Lemmygrad to switch to another hosting provider with better DDoS protection, as well as update the Lemmy code to patch the vulnerabilities the attackers were using.

Purge of the c/Hoxhaism community and banning of its creator

In June of 2022, a self-proclaimed Hoxhaist user by the name of Wisconcom would join Lemmygrad.ml. He would quickly centre his posts around China specifically, hurling all sorts of criticism at it. Regular users of Lemmygrad, whom by and large supported the People's Republic of China, began to argue with Wisconcom who did not budge on his views, using dubious or anti-communist sources such as the Hindustan Times, the Peterson Institute for International Economics or even tabloids such as "CAKnowledge" (despite the fact that the Lemmygrad users also regularly used Chinese or Russian billionaire-owned fake news outlets and tabloids).

Wisconcom was eventually banned from Lemmygrad for being overly combative and after several user reports about his bad faith and insulting behaviour, although the founder of Lemmygrad later said he was banned for "ultra-leftism"

He quickly created another account under the name of Ouisconcom and created the c/Hoxhaism community (c/ being the prefix to all community URLs on Lemmy). The community he had created was being used almost solely to criticise China in a relatively safe space and not, as the administrators expected, used to talk about Hoxhaism or Hoxha to any notable extent. A post was made looking for community input on this community and the general consensus was the the community should either be repurposed, or completely deleted and the user banned for ban evasion.

Eventually, the Lemmygrad community was in agreement that Wisconcom should be banned and the Hoxhaism community repurposed. However, due to the functioning of the Lemmy software at the time, when he was banned, so were all the communities he had created.

Later, Wisconcom would come back to Lemmygrad under different names trying to bait and stoke trouble within the community. His accounts were quickly banned again for ban evasion, as by that point nobody on Lemmygrad had any patience left for his antics.

Lemmygrad.com copycat site

In September of 2022, alleged patriotic socialists of the infrared community created lemmygrad.com, a website that was meant to copy Lemmygrad but with a "MAGA Communist" purpose.

The administrators of Lemmygrad, to protect their reputation, announced they had contacted lemmygrad.com's hosting provider on the grounds of copyright infrigement (one of the only things they could do that went against the Terms of Services). The host replied very quickly and took down lemmygrad.com, although the domain name was still usable by its owner.

Presently, the domain redirects to transphobic and reactionary propaganda hosted on Twitter.

Formalisation of rules

In the same month of September, the administrators of Lemmygrad would formalise two rules they had always operated on:

• "No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW)."
• "No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, strasserists, duginists, etc)."

The first rule was formalised by popular demand, although like most Marxist spaces, Lemmygrad did not allow pornography or other sexual nudity content from the start.

The second rule was also being operated on after some belligerent patriotic socialists attempting to create accounts on Lemmygrad and ultimately brought down the enjoyment the community had in using the website with their disruptive behaviour. However, it was formalised after lemmygrad.com was created as a basis to provide transparency to the community and make the banning of future patriotic socialists easier.

Merging of "Shit X Say" communities

Shit X Say communities, popular on Reddit (ShitLiberalsSay, ShitRedditSays...) were quickly brought over to Lemmygrad. For a while, c/ShitLiberalsSay was the biggest community. Eventually though, many more such communities were created by users and often left to abandon. Other users started complaining about these many communities that also, they felt, polluted their timeline and prevented them from seeing things other than hatful content. As such it was decided based on popular demand that all communities following the "Shit X Say" format would be merged under just two communities: ShitReactionariesSay and ShitUltrasSay. No other community of this type would be permitted on Lemmygrad after this.

Ideology

Lemmygrad has grown from an almost unvisited website back when it started to one of the biggest instances using the Lemmy software. This has caused many changes to happen in the working principles of the forum so as to respond to this external as well as internal growth.

Lemmygrad is principally "Marxist-Leninist" and supportive of "actually existing socialism". Users who do not support these concepts are often banned, despite no formal rule against these ideological grouping existing.